devbox:~$ iptables -A OUTPUT -j DROP

Looking at an ASCII data table can be difficult – so to start a small trip into Perl programming – I tossed together a simple Perl script, with no module requirements – zebra.pl as I call it, and it zebra stripes the output. It adds a nice touch to say vmstat or viewing something like the interrupts on a multicore box. It’s super simple and done in the nature of Aspersa. (Now a part of percona toolkit).

It doesn’t work 100% like I want – I would have liked it to take an $ARGV; to do that it seems like I’d have to create a dependency with a module (something like GetOpts) – so I decided one can simply modify the script to change how many X rows are striped.